The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD This page intentionally left blank THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD BEING, CONSCIOUSNESS, BLISS David Bentley Hart New Haven and London Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund. Copyright © 2013 by David Bentley Hart. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Adobe Garamond type by Integrated Publishing Solutions, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hart, David Bentley. The experience of God : being, consciousness, bliss / David Bentley Hart. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-16684-2 (cloth : alk paper) 1. God. 2. Experience (Religion) I. Title. BL473.H37 2013 211—dc23 2013007118 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Richard Shaker —whose vision of reality often differs from mine considerably— in gratitude for forty years of an indispensable friendship This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments, ix Introduction, 1 PART ONE God, Gods, and the World ONE “God” Is Not a Proper Name, 13 TWO Pictures of the World, 46 PART TWO Being, Consciousness, Bliss THREE Being (Sat), 87 FOUR Consciousness (Chit), 152 FIVE Bliss (Ananda), 238 PART THREE The Reality of God SIX Illusion and Reality, 293 vii Contents Notes, 333 Bibliographical Postscript, 343 Index, 351 viii Acknowledgments I owe my greatest thanks to my wife, Solwyn, and my son, Patrick, for their patience with me and with my sporadic work habits and capriciously shifting schedule during the writing of this book. I must also thank my farseeing and longsuffering editor at Yale University Press, Jennifer Banks, who endured far more delays in the delivery of a final manuscript than I myself would have toler- ated, and did so with a grace of manner I could not even attempt to emulate. To my indefatigable agent Giles Anderson I owe an immense debt of gratitude. And, finally, I must sincerely thank Roland W. Hart for his friendship, for allowing me to learn from the wisdom with which he approaches all of life, and for his willingness to listen to me on our numerous long walks together through the woods. ix This page intentionally left blank Introduction This is either an extremely ambitious or an extremely unambi- tious book. I tend to think it is the latter, but I can imagine how someone might see it quite otherwise. My intention is simply to offer a definition of the word “God,” or of its equivalents in other tongues, and to do so in fairly slavish obedience to the classical definitions of the divine found in the theological and philosophical schools of most of the major religious traditions. My reason for wanting to do this is that I have come to the conclusion that, while there has been a great deal of public debate about belief in God in recent years (much of it a little petulant, much of it positively fe- rocious), the concept of God around which the arguments have run their seemingly interminable courses has remained strangely obscure the whole time. The more scrutiny one accords these de- bates, moreover, the more evident it becomes that often the con- tending parties are not even talking about the same thing; and I would go as far as to say that on most occasions none of them is talking about God in any coherent sense at all. It is not obvious to me, therefore, that their differences really amount to a meaningful disagreement, as one cannot really have a disagreement without 1 Introduction some prior agreement as to what the basic issue of contention is. Perhaps this is not really all that surprising a situation. The fiercest disputes are often prompted by misapprehensions, and some of the most appalling battles in history have been fought by mistake. But I am enough of a romantic to believe that, if something is worth being rude about, it is worth understanding as well. This book, then, will be primarily a kind of lexicographical ex- ercise, not a work of apologetics, though that is a distinction that cannot be perfectly maintained throughout. Honestly, though, my chief purpose is not to advise atheists on what I think they should believe; I want merely to make sure that they have a clear concept of what it is they claim not to believe. In that sense, I should hope the more amiable sort of atheist might take this book as a well-intended gift. I am not even centrally concerned with traditional “proofs” of the reality of God, except insofar as they help to explain how the word “God” functions in the intellectual traditions of the developed religions (by which I mean faiths that in- clude sophisticated and self-critical philosophical and contemplative schools). I shall touch on the essential logic of those proofs where necessary, but shall not devote more attention than necessary to the larger arguments surrounding them. There are many texts that do that already (a few of which are listed at the end of this book), and there is no great need for yet another. By the same token, this will not be a book about theology either, or even about any single religion. The current fashion in belligerent atheism usu- ally involves flinging condemnations around with a kind of gal- lant extravagance, more or less in the direction of all faiths at once, with little interest in precise aim; I would not want to be any less generous in response. 2 Introduction I know, of course, that there are many persons who object in principle to any fraternization between different religious vocabu- laries, for various reasons—anxiety for creedal purity, fear that any acknowledgment of commonalities with other faiths might lead souls astray from the “one true path,” intellectual scruples regard- ing the contradictory claims made by different traditions, fear of a colonialist domestication of “the other,” a firm conviction that no religion can be true unless all others are clearly false, and so on— but those sorts of concerns leave me icily unmoved. For one thing, all the major theistic traditions claim that humanity as a whole has a knowledge of God, in some form or another, and that a perfect ignorance of God is impossible for any people (as Paul, for example, affirms in the letter to the Romans). For another, one can insist on absolutely inviolable demarcations between religions at every level only at the price of painfully unrefined accounts of what each tradition teaches. Religions ought never to be treated as though each were a single discrete proposition intended to provide a single exclusive answer to a single exhaustive question. It goes without saying that one generally should not try to dissolve dispa- rate creeds into one another, much less into some vague, syncre- tistic, doctrinally vacuous “spirituality.” It should also go without saying, however, that large religious traditions are complex things: sometimes they express themselves in the dream-languages of myth and sacred art, at other times in the solemn circumlocutions of lit- urgy and praise, at others in the serenity of contemplative prayer— or in ethical or sapiential precepts, or in inflexible dogmas, or in exactingly precise and rigorous philosophical systems. In all of these modes they may be making more or less proximate approaches to some dimension of truth; inevitably, however, they must employ 3 Introduction many symbols that cannot fully explain the truth in itself, but can only point toward it. It may be that one faith is truer than any other, or contains that ultimate truth to which all faiths aspire in their various ways; but that still would hardly reduce all other religions to mere falsehood. More to the point, no one really ac- quainted with the metaphysical and spiritual claims of the major theistic faiths can fail to notice that on a host of fundamental philosophical issues, and especially on the issue of how divine transcen- dence should be understood, the areas of accord are quite vast. Certainly the definition of God I offer below is one that, allowing for a number of largely accidental variations, can be found in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, various late antique paganisms, and so forth (it even ap- plies in many respects to various Mahayana formulations of, say, the Buddha Consciousness or the Buddha Nature, or even to the earliest Buddhist conception of the Unconditioned, or to certain aspects of the Tao, though I do not want to upset Western con- verts to Buddhism or philosophic Taoism by insisting on the point here). There is an old Scholastic distinction between religious trea- tises written “de Deo uno” and those written “de Deo trino”: between, that is, those that are “about the one God” known to persons of various faiths and philosophies and those that are “about the Trinitarian God” of Christian doctrine. I want to distinguish in a similar way between, on the one hand, metaphysical or philosophical descriptions of God and, on the other, dogmatic or con- fessional descriptions, and then to confine myself to the former.

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